


Nymph

by oh_kay



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, POV Second Person, Post 3a, mentioned Derek Hale/others
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:00:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_kay/pseuds/oh_kay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something to be said about the afterlife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nymph

There will be others after you; women whose faces will be round and open, men with kind eyes and soft lips, and none of those people will be dangerous, none will be you. There is no you.

Your bones will turn into ash, and your dying breath will run along the equator, once, twice, three times, and you will soak into the ground and dispel in the air, and your blood will be the sacrificial blood seeped deep into the roots of an old, old tree, and you will live through the Nemeton, but you won’t be alive. There is no you.

Derek will fuck other people, and every name whispered into a bare(d) neck will be like the first: name, cut, blood, victim. It will hurt. It would be stupid, if you weren’t a ghost, if you weren’t a tree, if you were. But you are a ghost (of a touch on his skin), you are a tree (bound to his family by blood and obligation and centuries of magic darker than you, darker than him), and there’s no you to speak of. Safe to assume you’ve earned your right to be a dramatic diva.

In the meantime, you take what you can. Peter’s destruction hanging over Beacon Hills like a heavy cloud. Cora’s will to learn, her bruises and broken bones and roar when she charges at her brother, young and stupid and brave. Derek’s laughter when he fends her off, proud smile when he can’t—you absorb it all. Your flowers are deep red and beautiful and just like you. They bloom for a day before Peter comes and rips them away, burns the ground around you, burns you.

You make his fire yours.

(Derek fucks one Julie—close enough, you think—and two Jennifers, and you are surprised at what little meaning names have after all even as you plot Julie and Jennifers’ premature demises. What can you say, you’ve always been a little obsessive. Who is without sin et cetera. Besides, it’s a bit too late to change now.)

Peter dies soon after, in the remnants of his old home, and when you look at the bloody face of one Lydia Martin, on her fingers sharp and crooked like claws, you cannot help but be glad you didn’t manage to kill her. It doesn’t stop you from taking from her too, obviously: her exhaustion, and her desperation, and her spine of steel. The next flower will be even redder, you know.

They don’t come to you after, the Beacon Hills pack. You don’t mind. You come to them, in their dreams—those that belong to the night, those that belong to the day—in the things they defeat, in Deaton’s words. (They don’t know it yet, but you are all alike, the emissaries. The wolves. You all who run together. You who fight. You who are sacrificed.) There’s a darkness around their hearts, and it shall always bear your name. It’s not enough, but it’s something.

That’s how you preserve.

(Derek fucks an Alice that night. They’ve dated for a few weeks. He’ll leave her soon to come back to Beacon Hills, and she’ll throw a glass after him. In your opinion, he has a terrible taste in women.)

He returns on a rainy evening in May. The air is no different now that a Hale is back in Beacon Hills. The earth doesn’t sing when he does his jogging in the morning, the sunlight isn’t brighter, the shadows aren’t shorter in the wee hours of the mornings, but you can feel him, you can feel him close. You try to be rain falling on his face one day, but it’s still beyond your power. That’s all right, you will learn. This spring, you console yourself with three white flowers amongst the sea of red on your branches.

You try to be proud of him when you see him with Scott, with Stiles, reaching a tentative hand to Allison, but you are who you are, so he makes you the proudest when he kills. Chooses to be a killer, you correct yourself and laugh—well, as much as you can with no mouth to laugh with. Point is, you are not above admitting that it makes you happy, even though he kills a man for doing blood sacrifices. It stings, a reminder of the things that were, so you focus on how Scott and Deaton had a plan, on how Derek disagreed. You looked into that man’s soul, you saw his methods— Enough said, you’d advocate for the ultimate solution, too.

He starts visiting you, after that. At first it happens only when the blood is fresh on his hands, then every month (you don’t pull him in, you are not the moon), then every week. Sometimes, he sleeps at your roots, curled like a baby. Your leaves sing him a quiet lullaby. When he sighs in his sleep, something in you swells.

Enough to make yourself open, make yourself harmless, safe for him to come to. You become the ground beneath his feet, and he howls for you.

You bloom.

(And wait.)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally at [Tumblr](http://kayfeatures.tumblr.com). Come say hi if you wanna!


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